Social Postures

The article under discussion can be found here

Module: Understanding the Social World
Submitted: 22 October 2009

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In October 2008 Felicity Lawrence wrote the feature ‘Britain on a Plate’ for The Guardian, a politically left-of-centre and socially progressive British broadsheet newspaper. Using ‘celebrity chef’ Jamie Oliver’s reality television programme ‘Ministry of Food’ as an entry point, Lawrence posits that the diet a British person follows is inextricably linked with the class into which they fall and that in order to address the problems that result from poor diet, Britain needs to address more general issues of inequality.

To communicate her ideas and maintain reader interest, she bookends her academic and historical research with examples from Oliver’s programme, and quotes statistics and authoritative sources to support her argument. This analysis will show, however, that although Lawrence’s argument is well structured and full of authoritative information, there are problems with her logic and her use of statistics. These serve to undermine its ultimate success.

Lawrence introduces the piece with the striking image of Oliver, using his trademark expletives, comparing the dietary habits of a recently-visited Rotherham family unfavourably with AIDS orphans in Soweto. She follows this with a barrage of evocative images to illustrate the scene Oliver has just witnessed: Natasha, a woman on benefits, has never ‘properly cooked at home’ for her family. They ‘sit on the floor – no table, no cutlery’ eating ‘kebabs… chips … processed cheese… instant noodles’. Natasha, we are told, spends most of her benefits on ‘fast food and junk’ despite owning an ‘eight-hob gas cooker’ and ‘flatscreen TV’.

This emotive opening grabs the attention of readers interested in reading about life outside their experience (according to the National Readership Survey, almost 90% of Guardian readers are in the ABC1 social grades[1] – unlikely to be living on benefits) and those with an interest in Oliver or his programme. Her main thesis around food and class, however, is not revealed until the end of the third and into the fourth paragraph and not explicitly developed until after two more ‘Ministry of Food’ examples (Geoff, an 84 year old who is unable to cook and Clare, who lives on chocolate and crisps and struggles with a recipe).

This is deliberate. Lawrence aims to keep the interest of the reader, invoking the twin feelings of pity and disgust, before moving on to use of academic and historical evidence to explain why all is not as simple as they (or Oliver) at first thought. Her use of the programme as a framing device for exploring her thesis is an effective way to attract the less politically-minded to her ideas. Conversely, however, the emotive, almost sensationalist nature of the opening may put off the more ‘seriously’ minded.

Moving onto the real substance of her article, Lawrence uses income and diet statistics from trustworthy organisations such as the World Health Organisation and Food Standards Agency. She also encompasses academic research from Warwick University and includes information from a food historian from the National Trust. In addition to these she provides some social history with a quote from George Orwell. This wide range of sources all serve to give weight to her article and thus her thesis.

Lawrence uses statistics to support her points regarding the working class, but provides the reader with few comparators. 60% of the adult population of Rotherham, she tells us, are either overweight or obese, but the statistic is meaningless without an indication of the obesity of the general population. A quick check of the Low Income Diet and Nutrition Survey (to which Lawrence refers later) finds that these figures are ‘in about the same proportion as the population at large’[2]. At another point she says that ‘children in low-income groups are inactive almost all day’ but without a higher-income comparator.

In addition, Lawrence’s article contains a number of unsupported leaps of logic. ‘This is a delicate but painful portrait of the socially excluded’, she writes after her first raft of examples from ‘Ministry of Food’, but readers would be forgiven for failing to connect the dots. Despite saying of the programme ‘The subtext is everything’, Lawrence has herself only obliquely implied that Natasha, Geoff and Clare are socially excluded as opposed to neglectful, elderly and gluttonous respectively.

She paints Oliver as an unwitting class warrior, employing revolutionary imagery around him throughout her article. She writes of Oliver’s ‘inimitable language of protest’ and shouting ‘from the barricade of his celebrity jeep’, topping it off with her comparison of Julie Critchlow, Oliver’s “enemy”, to a ‘tricoteuse at the guillotine’. Yet Lawrence fails to draw a line connecting the people in the programme to the working class that Oliver is inadvertently championing. This is unless one is to assume that simply because a person lives in Rotherham, or takes part in this programme, or is under educated, they are working class. Further, at the end of the article Lawrence declares that as Oliver only wants to educate those that people will pass on the training, he has now ‘learned that… tackling class inequality is a long, hard slog’. It’s a very long bow to draw.

Lawrence asserts, without evidence, that middle class people eat junk because ‘time is their problem’, and presumes that Geoff’s children can’t help him cook because of ‘distance and some of the longest working hours in Europe’. Later in the article she writes that those on low incomes buy the food that will fill them most cheaply, thus the eating of junk food is a ‘rational decision’. To support this point, Lawrence includes the calculation of the monetary cost of 100 calories from various foodstuffs which shows that that unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy food. The decision to eat junk is only rational, however, if one accepts that bulk calories are needed by those on low incomes which, given the level of obesity amongst this group (and in general society) is false. Also it is arguable that the ‘rationality’ of buying cheap rubbish is outweighed by the irrationality of damaging one’s (and one’s children’s) health through malnutrition or obesity.

Overall, Lawrence succeeds in catching the attention of those who may be watching the ‘Ministry of Food’ through her effective use of the programme as an introduction to her class and diet thesis. She uses authoritative sources to support her argument, however struggles to connect the research with the subjects of the documentary and use statistics in an unconvincing manner. She may have a point, but in her eagerness to bring it to her audience she fails to connect the programme and her statistics and bring about a completely credible conclusion.

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[1] National Readership Survey (2009), ‘NRS Readership Estimates – Newspapers and Supplements’ (accessed 19th October 2009) http://www.nrs.co.uk/downloads/pdf/download.php?filename=newspapers_200906.pdf

[2] Food Standards Agency (2007) Low Income Diet and Nutrition Survey, (accessed 14 October 2009] Available from http://www.food.gov.uk/science/dietarysurveys/lidnsbranch